Much trauma is caused by unfair uses of power in groups, particularly by moderators of online communities, who often act with unfair bias. This is a place to make such cases known to try to deter them from happening.

Monthly Archives: February 2015

A response circulating to Stephen Fry’s famous outburst of theology, in the atheist interview he gave to Irish TV. It is good for grassroots democracy and answerability of the famous, that a holding of him to account by applying his own words to a past item in his career, should get a decent circulation.

How dared Stephen Fry help to create the Blackadder 2 episode that blamed the victim for the undeserved suffering of school bullying, by linking joke villainous character to the receiving, not the perpetrating, of misery in children? It’s not right. It’s utterly utterly evil. Why should I respect capricious mean-minded stupid comedy that targets children for such injustice and pain for attributes not their fault, in real schools after the episode’s every broadcast? What’s that about? You could easily have created a Blackadder where that did not exist.

Fry is outspoken on being gay, and according to gay site Pink News 22 Jun 17, in Australia, Dale Park of the Victoria Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby told news.com.au, after an anti-transgender comment by a TV sport presenter: “You feel angry when people in positions of power think they can use [vulnerable communities] as a cheap stunt or cheap set-up. … They knew the reaction it was going to get – it seems like it was purposeful and designed to create hurt and laughter which is unacceptable.” Where werethe voices to say that about Blackadder, when it describes perfectly what it did?
2 Jan 2016: to follow this up, this post on a Youtube vid from The Boy In The Dress was well received and puts the BBC on the spot about its double standard:
It certainly is against UK school rules, historically and still in any school that has not actually lost an equality case. It is indeed and always has been, deliberately unfair to every minority, hoping for them not to exist. School uniforms, popular with moral conservatives despite paedos’ known interest in them, are a physically brutal child abuse taking no account of bodily wellbeing and purposed to reduce kids to cogs in a machine with no identities of their own. They originate in nineteenth century machine oppression of workers. Autism, and attention deficit and tourette’s and many related conditions, have now shown that humans have varying and sometimes very strong “sensory issues”, an actual medical term for physical sensitivities to texture and enclosure and heat. All dress codes are therefore genocide. They wipe out physically real human minorities.

One reason uniforms are accepted, is that peer groups of the kids themselves can be equally as genocidal to each other as the adult system – that proves it’s also an abuse to group any kid into a school class with peers they dislike, at all. The institution of forced school itself is evil, herding them around like farm animals. Uniforms are often made of uncomfortable fabrics, and constrict the wearers by requiring ties and top shirt buttons. Most torturing of all is the gender oppression. While many girls find skirt uniforms sexploitative, the physical suffering is male.

Boys above some arbitrary age which can be quite young, uniforms generally force to always wear long trousers, no matter how hot it is, while around them often are girls of the same age with completely free choices over leg comfort. This glaringly daily visible cruel inequality never got any media comment at all. For at least 2 generations, and in my time (I’m 47), it was so silently accepted nobody could get any hearing questioning it: knowing there is an age-related peer group bigotry against shorts too which the boys would still not be free from. Still now, when we are all supposed to be angry at the BBC’s child abusing history, nobody is speaking up against the massive national pogrom hate crime it committed on kids since 1986, by endorsing and inciting bullying for an acute vulnerability that is not a kid’s fault, portraying the victim as to blame and actually gloating over psychological scarring, in a popular comedy called Blackadder 2.

It presented as a comic villain a man damaged by bullying trauma including because his mum made him wear shorts to school against the unjust age stigma – this was bonechilingly frequently broadcast and sold on video, to reach real bullies, real boys in a morally evil situation society is sick to allow, and by their abuse keeping most other boys terrorised out of choosing shorts if allowed them, or out of admitting they want to be allowed them.

Only in the last decade had equal opportunities law become strong enough that middle-school-aged boys in the luckiest situations of not too yobby schools and having nothing to lose, could start making gender justice challenges to schools that don’t allow shorts – and increasing numbers once it had started, have used skirts to make this challenge. The second earliest known one (why not the earliest? media caprice) won an award. He, and others since, cited the trousers physically spoiling his concentration – exactly my experience too. Yet neither any Savile-style ragingly remorseful inquest into Blackadder, nor any end to gender unjust uniforms, have followed.

And now, very soon after that, he is in trouble for mocking and emotionally belittling sexual abuse victims. In all the loss of admiration and fandom over that, the scales have fallen from many eyes, for this was the emotional character behind the whole hooligan savage “alternative comedy” style that created Blackadder 2.